The Concept of Sovereignty in Islam and in the West

Abstract

For ages, the notion of sovereignty has been considered to be the bearer of all what modern political science centers on, and also a constitutive to anything known as modern politics. The idea of sovereignty has evolved to constitute an exclusive right to exercise a supreme political authority over a designated territory and the people within that territory without any foreign intervention and this has become synonymous with what is known as political independence. Whenever sovereignty is presented as a property of an individual state or as a general concept, it is already given to an observation empirically or semantically. This in turn muddles up the proceedings of political science inquiry into the nature of its objects. This research work is divided into five chapters. It opens with the introduction which gave the background to the study, the statement of the problem, aims and objectives of the research, some definition of terms, the research methodology adopted and the originality and significance of the thesis. The second chapter opens with the literature review. Here, the concept of sovereignty was discussed especially its origin and development. The history presented in this thesis dated the origin of sovereignty back to the Middle Age, and from there it discerns how the locus and scope of sovereignty changed with time and space. This metamorphosed into a sequential series of accumulative debates, with which sovereignty is being passed round from God to king, and then from the king down to the people. The concept of positive laws, the birth of nation state and the concept of Absolutism are analyzed. Some theories like the Monistic and Pluralistic theory of sovereignty and their theorists of sovereignty were also discussed. The world has witnessed a series of changes internationally over the last century, a particularly new occurrence in its naming and prominence at all phases called globalization. The effects globalization and the non-state actors had on the incidence and notion of sovereignty and state authority were examined. This research work also features the fundamental nature of sovereignty in Islam, and the two different levels of sovereignty in Islam which is the judicial and executive sovereignty are explained. It concludes with a comparative analysis of the concept of sovereignty in Islam and west including the impact of the western thought on the contemporary state of in the Muslim world.